I never expected starting out, but then again, back in 1979 when I started out, the manufacturers never made the kind of wild marketing promises they make now.
Nobody ever claimed back then that with a Portastudio or a 3340 you could make recordings that sounded like they were released by Telarc, and there were no cheap shit $99 condensors pretending to be U47s.
Gear was simple, you went to Allied Electronics to buy electronics parts, not Radio Shack for mass-market TVs and cell phones. Engineering actually meant engineering, and quality recording took as much talent as quality performing, and most of us knew it.
Today, OTOH, we're bombarded with ads for studios in a box that equate gear capacity with production quality - "hey you, yeah you with the booger hanging out your nose, for a thousand bucks you too can own a Shatner 2000 digital workstation tonight and be a famous rock star on meSpace tomorrow!" And in a time when people would rather spend their time faking it by pusing a few preset buttons on Guitar Hero than they would actually picking up a guitar and playing it, that bullshit marketing is eaten up faster than a box of Oreos at a pot party.
G.